From Otello to The Winter’s Tale, the Royal Opera House has a long and continuing tradition of performing operas and ballets inspired by Shakespeare. But his plays themselves have also played a part in our history. As we mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death on 23 April 2016, ROH Collections has delved into the Royal Opera House archives to look at some of those early Shakespeare performances staged at Covent Garden.

Decades before the Royal Shakespeare Company was established — and centuries before the rebuilding of Shakespeare's Globe — the Theatre Royal, the first theatre on our Covent Garden site, opened its doors in 1732. It began life as a playhouse, staging a variety of entertainments including plays, pantomimes, dances and operas. Items from ROH Collections show that Shakespeare was an important part of this mix. We know that Romeo and Juliet was performed on 1 March 1750, while the earliest playbill in the ROH Collections for a Shakespeare play is for Henry V, on 3 December 1755.

Over the following century many more Shakespeare plays were staged, including The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, The Comedy of Errors and Much Ado About Nothing – suggesting Shakespeare was a staple at Covent Garden. In fact, it was a performance of Macbeth that opened the second theatre on 18 September 1809, after the original Theatre Royal was destroyed by fire the previous year. Actors in this production included John and Charles Kemble and their sister Sarah Siddons — all were regulars on the Covent Garden stage.

John Philip Kemble had won fame through his performances at the nearby Theatre Royal on Drury Lane, ever since Kemble’s critically acclaimed debut as Hamlet in 1783. John became manager at Covent Garden in 1803, again making his first appearance as Hamlet. Through to his final performance in 1817 he starred in many other Shakespeare plays, including Richard III, Henry VIII, The Tempest, King Lear, Coriolanus and King John. It was for his performances as Macbeth that he became best known, the part he played in the 1809 re-opening of the theatre.

John’s brother Charles took over as manager on John’s retirement, and remained in the post until 1832. He was also a well-known Shakespearian actor, performing many times alongside his brother as well as appearing in Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Sarah, the oldest of the Kemble siblings, was equally renowned, and was in fact the first of the family to perform at Covent Garden, playing Belvidera in Venice Preserved in February 1786. John, Charles, Sarah and a third brother, Stephen, regularly performed together at Covent Garden, most notably in Henry VIII. Charles’s daughter Fanny also graced the Covent Garden stage, often alongside her father.

In 1847 the theatre was renamed the Royal Italian Opera, and opera became its main focus. But that early history as a Shakespeare theatre, and the legacy of the Kembles, is continued on through the many Shakespeare-inspired operas and ballets that are key parts of the ROH repertory today.

In the 11 years between Nabucco (1842) and La traviata (1853), Verdi wrote 15 operas. By the time of Traviata he was 40 years old and near the height of his fame as a composer. Amazing as it might seem though, Verdi could look forward to four more decades of professional activity. But compared to the prolific decade or so previously, the results were somewhat meagre. After La traviata, just eight original operas appeared. So, what stemmed the Verdian flow?

The comparison with Rossini’s retirement from the stage in 1829, which happened at roughly the same age as Verdi had reached in 1853, is telling. Verdi shared with Rossini a conviction that the musical world was changing too fast, and along paths they had no desire to follow. For Verdi, the cultural enemy came from outside Italy’s new frontier. Fulminate as he might, he could do little to diminish a new Italian fascination for other European operatic styles (first for the French, then – worse – the German) that invaded the birthplace of opera just as it achieved nationhood.

Time and again, Verdi trumpeted forth his distress at these foreign imports: at the blague and superciliousness of the French, with their over-inflated grand opera (he liked to call the Paris Opéra ‘la grande boutique’). He was even more vocal about the barbarity and symphonic obsessions of the Germans, and how their influence was destroying native talent. In a letter to a friend, written very late in life, he joked bitterly:

"At present I’m extremely busy putting the finishing touches to an opera in twelve acts plus prelude and an overture as long as Beethoven’s nine symphonies all joined up together; there’s also a prelude to each act with all the violins, violas, cellos and basses playing together a melody in octaves, not in the manner of Traviata or Rigoletto, etc, etc, but with a modern melody, one of those beautiful ones that has neither beginning nor end and remains suspended in the air."

There was, though, a critical difference between Rossini’s and Verdi’s later careers. Rossini’s operatic retirement was permanent; with Verdi the flame refused to die. Even in advanced old age, when his public pronouncements were ever more uncompromising about the sins of modernity, the compelling vitality that had been such a feature of Verdi’s early operas remained intact, allowing him to create musical drama that could affect audiences belonging to a world of changed values.

In many ways the most remarkable part of this ‘second period’ in Verdi’s career was its last phase. After the premiere of Aida in 1871 it did indeed seem as though his struggle with modernity was at an end. For 16 years, there were no new operas. But then, in the 1880s, with Verdi into his seventies, the spark again ignited: Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893) emerged, both in collaboration with composer-librettist Arrigo Boito.

After Falstaff’s triumphant premiere of there was inevitably talk of a third Verdi-Boito collaboration: a version of Antony and Cleopatra was suggested, and a King Lear. But it was not to be. In spite of some beautiful late religious pieces, Verdi’s world narrowed. His partner of some fifty years, Giuseppina Strepponi, died in November 1897. There are some very sad final letters to another soprano, Teresa Stolz, with whom he had been much involved, perhaps romantically, in the dark, opera-less years of the 1870s.

In these letters, Verdi laments the loss of vitality and strength, courage and power – those qualities that he gave so generously in the service of musical and dramatic expression. There is also, at the last, a tender expression of love and loyalty. Most striking of all, though, is an uncompromising honesty, a willingness to stare full in the face what a changing world offers. These were just some of the qualities that caused his last years to be peopled with such astonishing operatic characters.

This is an edited extract from Roger Parker’s article ‘Verdi’s Late Flowering’ in The Royal Opera’s programme book, available during performances and from the ROH Shop.

Monteverdi’s Orfeo retells a very old and very well-known tale: the demigod Orpheus – son of Apollo and the muse Calliope – marries Eurydice, is devastated when she dies, and goes to the world of the dead hoping to bring her back. ‘It's a very simple, human story’, explains director Michael Boyd. ‘A man can’t stand it when the woman he loves dies; he wants to be with her but he’s not allowed to; and so he is left without her.’

Yet this simple, human story is also one of the most enduring myths of the ancient world, and its themes and symbols reach deep into the human psyche. The Orpheus myth is about the power of poetry and music to lift or calm the spirits of humans and even to influence the will of the gods; about the special genius of the poet or musician who harnesses that power; about the restrictions on human power, and the power of the gods over human lives. It is about those rare humans who dare to cross boundaries.

With Orfeo being one of the first operas, audiences seeing the piece in Monteverdi’s time were not familiar with the peculiar kind of performance he and his librettist Striggio had created. One excited courtier commented that ‘all the performers speak musically’. In our own times audiences new to opera or new to Orfeo may be similarly excited. With a new translation of the libretto by Don Paterson, the opera is revived for the 21st century.

‘Don Paterson is a musician and a poet’, says Boyd. ‘He’s brought to the libretto the daring and skill of the poet and the respect of the musician. It is an extraordinarily vivid new version, and the more I work with it the more I find it miraculous. It is so un-stuffy; lyrical but not flowery, punchy but beautiful, and it is genuinely and thoughtfully singable.

‘The music is just so exquisite. I’m hoping that for audiences new to Monteverdi – or new to opera – it will be like listening to Shakespeare. After the first five minutes, you forget that this is an unfamiliar experience in a strange language, and you begin to hear it… . And then we can let Monteverdi break our hearts.’

Boyd is no stranger to Renaissance theatre. After five years as Associate Director at the Royal Shakespeare Company, he was the company’s Artistic Director from 2002 to 2012. The time Boyd has spent with Shakespeare and his contemporaries has influenced his new production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo – his debut as a director of opera.

‘What Shakespeare was so good at’, Boyd explains, ‘was telling fables about abuses of power with the implication that the noble patrons of the art form – "you, my great and most serene lords" – were lending their support to a moral tale. Artists of Renaissance courts who openly rebelled against authority found themselves out of work, in prison, dead, tortured, or their works burned. But, like in Shakespeare, in Monteverdi any hint of commentary is perfectly poised and perfectly ambiguous’.

Boyd and Olivier Award-winning designer Tom Piper see such a fable in Orfeo, which they have set in an environment that suggests imprisonment. ‘It’s a kind of custodial situation. There’s the feeling of imposing judgement, a hierarchy with a lot at stake. The notion of Orfeo, Euridice and their companions being at the mercy of the gods was something we wanted to capture in some way. They’re singing for their lives, for their destinies. They’re singing for the truth to be told, whatever that may be.’

This is an extract from Will Richmond's article 'Between Heaven and Hell' in The Royal Opera and the Roundhouse's programme book, available during performances at the Roundhouse.

Orfeo runs 13–24 January 2015 at the Roundhouse. Limited numbers of tickets are available from the Royal Opera House and Roundhouse websites. The production is a new collaboration between the Roundhouse and The Royal Opera.

In 1763, David Garrick shook up the theatre world by banning audience members from sitting onstage at Drury Lane.

Since the theatres had re-opened in 1660 (after the Restoration), it had become common practice to pay a few extra pennies for the privilege of sitting on the stage. A century earlier, audiences at The Globe were also often as concerned with being seen themselves as with watching the play – as one contemporary diarist, Thomas Platter, put it, ‘Anyone who remains on the level standing pays only one English penny; but if he wants to sit, he is let in at a farther door, and there he gives another penny. If he desires to sit… where he not only sees everything well, but can also be seen then he gives yet another English penny.’

From the earliest staged performances, audience-watching has played a huge part. So it’s no surprise that the idea of people watching people watching a performance has seeped into theatre and opera, in the form of the play-within-a-play.

Perhaps the most famous example is Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whose ‘rude mechanicals’ provide much of the comedy with their ‘most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe'. Taking his cue from Shakespeare, Purcell incorporates a masque into his A Midsummer Night’s Dream-inspired The Fairy Queen. Rather than a comic interlude courtesy of Bottom and co., however, Purcell conjures the god Phoebus to oversee a masque celebrating the four seasons. Almost three centuries later, Shakespeare’s play-within-a-play becomes an opera-within-an-opera in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in a scene where the composer sends up both the actors’ misguided dramatic intentions and 19th-century opera in one fell swoop.

In both Strauss’s Salome and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, a show-within-the-show proves to be a turning point. In Salome, we watch Herod voyeuristically enjoying Salome’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ after his ill-advised promise to give her whatever she wants in return. Wagner’s opera, meanwhile, comes to a head with a singing competition between Nuremberg’s Guild of Mastersingers – with a rather happier ending than the singing competition in his earlier opera Tannhäuser.

Some works, though, take the idea further and explicitly frame the entire work as an opera-within-an-opera, unsettling the ‘real’ audience’s sense of reality. Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos is one such opera.

Originally written as a stand-alone divertissement to be performed after Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Ariadne auf Naxos was later re-worked, with a Prologue added to create the opera that is performed today. In the Prologue, Strauss introduces us to the composer, a music master, a wig-maker, some comedians and a prima donna diva. We see the comic and chaotic preparations for the evening’s entertainment – and then become the audience for the performance itself.

To completely different effect, Berg opens Lulu with a Prologue in which a circus ringmaster addresses the audience and introduces his menagerie – the prize of which is the ‘snake’ Lulu. Like Ariadne, though, the effect is to add another audience layer (or ‘diegetic level’), and to frame the rest of the opera as a performance. The palindromic film that comes half-way through the opera takes us another step deeper.

More recently, composers and directors have adapted this stage tradition to include television-shows-within-operas, to the same effect: think of Anna’s appearance on ‘Larry King Live’ in Turnage’s Anna Nicole and Jonathan Kent’s recent staging of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, in which Manon dances for both a live audience onstage and a fleet of television cameras.

Composers, librettists and playwrights continue to be fascinated by our love of spectacle. And in the very best examples these make us question our assumptions about reality itself. When you’re watching an opera-within-an-opera, as Orwell didn’t quite say, you look from actors to audience, and from audience to actors again, but sometimes it’s impossible to say which is which.

Ariadne auf Naxos runs until 13 July 2014. Tickets are still available. The production is given with generous philanthropic support from Hélène and Jean Peters, Hamish and Sophie Forsyth and The Maestro’s Circle.

Antonio Pappano conducts the cast and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House in concert at the Symphony Hall, Birmingham, on 6 July 2014. Tickets are still available.

It’s not often that a play is best known for one stage direction. But then not many stage directions are as memorable as the one that appears in Act III of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: ‘Exit, pursued by a bear.’

The character being pursued is Antigonus, a lord of Sicilia, who has been ordered to abandon the baby Princess Perdita . He is interrupted in his cruel errand by the arrival of the bear, an encounter that proves fatal for him – but not for the baby.

Another theory has gained credence in the last few years. In 1609 (around the time the play was written) King James I was given two polar bear cubs that had been captured on a voyage to the Arctic. One of these cubs could well have featured in the premiere – a bear cub would have been much less dangerous than a full-grown animal, and would surely have been a hit with audiences.

For a multitude of very sensible reasons, real bears are now unlikely to be used in productions of The Winter’s Tale. Representations of the bear have generally fallen into two types: realistic (an actor in a bear suit) and more conceptual.

On the realistic side, Charles Kean’s bear in his 1856 production was praised in The Times as ‘a masterpiece of the zoological art’. An early 20th-century production by Harley Granville-Barker and a 1951 staging by Peter Brook were both praised for having convincingly ferocious bears.

But the problem with the bear-suit approach is that the scene can often end up being funny – and this direction is about a man being mauled to death. That essential mismatch has led directors to search for less ‘pantomime’ ways of staging the scene.

Conceptual versions of the stage direction have included a shadow of a bear seen in a flash of lightning (director Ronald Eyre, 1981), a bear evoked by a screech and a growl (James Lapine, 1989) and, in Greg Doran’s 1999 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the fallen canopy of the Sicilian palace morphed into the shape of a bear. In a 1986 production by Terry Hands a polar bear rug reared up to chase off the terrified Antigonus.

Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon is keeping tight-lipped about how he’ll be staging the scene for The Royal Ballet – but he has said the famous bear moment won’t involve any dancers…

Two kings separated as children are reunited in adulthood. One king, Leontes of Sicilia, marries Hermione, giving her a beautiful emerald. They have a son, Mamilllius, and are blissfully happy. The other king, Polixenes of Bohemia, visits the court of Leontes. He is delighted to be reunited with his old friend and stays for nine months. By the time of his departure, Hermione is about to give birth to her second child.

Act I

The court of Sicilia

It is the day of Polixenes’ departure. The Bohemian court say goodbye to their Sicilian friends. At Hermione’s request, Polixenes agrees to stay on another week. In a flash of jealousy, Leontes becomes convinced that his wife has been unfaithful and is carrying Polixenes’ child. Jealousy turns to rage and he attacks Polixenes, who flees back to Bohemia. Leontes publicly accuses Hermione of adultery and treason, then has her arrested. This so distresses Mamillius that he falls seriously ill. In prison, Hermione has given birth to a daughter. The head of her household, Paulina, brings the newborn to Leontes, hoping to convince him that the baby is his daughter. Instead, Leontes violently rejects the child, then orders Paulina’s husband Antigonus to abandon the baby in a remote place. Antigonus sets sail into a brewing storm with the baby and some treasure, including the emerald once given to Hermione by Leontes. Hermione is brought to trial and pleads her innocence. Leontes, now quite mad, refuses to believe her. Dazed and feverish, Mamillius enters the courtroom and, upon witnessing the unfolding tragedy, he collapses and dies from distress. Seeing the death of her child, Hermione too collapses dead and is taken away. Only now does Leontes realize the disastrous consequences of his terrible mistake.

The shores of Bohemia

Battling the storm, Antigonus struggles ashore to abandon the baby princess. As he leaves, he is pursued and killed by a wild bear. His ship, waiting at sea, is smashed to pieces on the rocks. As day breaks, a shepherd and his son Clown discover the baby girl and the treasure.

Act II

A hillside in Bohemia. Sixteen years later.

Perdita, the abandoned daughter of King Leontes and Queen Hermione, has been raised by the shepherd who found her. She dances beneath the great tree with her love, Prince Florizel, the son of Polixenes, whom the other villagers know only as a shepherd boy. The villagers arrive for the annual springtime festival. King Polixenes, who has heard that his son has been cavorting with a shepherdess, sends his steward to spy on the young prince. When the steward confirms his suspicions, Polixenes is enraged, and demands to see for himself. At the festival, Perdita is to be crowned May Queen. In honour of the occasion, Father Shepherd presents her with the emerald necklace he found with her on the beach. Polixenes and his steward arrive in disguise, keen to see what Florizel is up to. On witnessing Florizel’s engagement to a mere shepherdess, Polixenes reveals himself. He is furious with Florizel, and condemns Perdita and her family to death. They all flee by boat to Sicilia, pursued by Polixenes.

Act III

A clifftop in Sicilia

King Leontes mourns by the clifftop graves of his wife and son, watched over by Paulina. Perdita and Florizel’s ship approaches Sicilia.

The palace in Sicilia

Perdita and Florizel appeal to Leontes to allow their union, and to intercede with the enraged Polixenes on their behalf. Leontes is taken with the likeness of Florizel to Polixenes. He agrees to help the young couple, who remind him of his lost children. Polixenes arrives and Leontes tries to reason with him, but he violently handles Perdita, revealing the emerald. The long lost Princess of Sicilia is miraculously alive and the two kings are reunited. The Palace celebrates the wedding of Florizel and Perdita. As the festivities die down, Leontes is led by Paulina to see a new statue of Hermione. Deeply remorseful, he kneels at its base. Suddenly, the statue comes to life – it is Hermione, who is alive and has been kept in hiding by Paulina for 16 years. She embraces Leontes, and the family is reunited.

The Story Begins…Two kings, Leontes of Sicilia and Polixenes of Bohemia, were separated as children. Leontes, his wife Hermione and their son, Mamillius, are blissfully happy. Polixenes visits the court of Leontes. The two old friends are delighted to be reunited, and Polixenes stays for nine months. By the time of his departure, Hermione is about to give birth to her second child, and Leontes is thrown into an agony of suspicion…

Adapting a 'Problem Play'The Winter’s Tale was the last full-length play written by Shakespeare before The Tempest. Its unusual combination of dark drama and comedy, as well as its expansive timespan and complex plot, means that it is performed less frequently than some other Shakespeare plays; it is perhaps known more for its famous stage direction, ‘exit, pursued by a bear’, than for anything else. In his adaptation, Wheeldon has streamlined the plot to focus on its main characters and themes, revealing it to be perfect fodder for gripping narrative ballet.

All-consuming jealousy

The driving force behind the plot of The Winter’s Tale is Leontes’ unfounded jealousy against his wife and friend, and the destruction it creates. This provided the perfect opportunity for Wheeldon to create a leading role for Edward Watson, with whom he has collaborated regularly and who he believes ‘can handle a slightly older, more mature character’. The ballet also includes a further five principal roles, providing exciting opportunities to display the Company’s star dancers, as well as promising talent from within the ranks.

Darkness and Light

The music and designs for The Winter’s Tale, by Joby Talbot and Bob Crowley, vividly depict the contrasting worlds explored in the ballet. Dreary, black costumes and musical devices, such as strangulated low brass and muted trumpets, evoke the murky and troubled Sicilian court; while vibrant sets and costumes, along with shimmering, golden musical textures and an exotic stage consort conjure up the light-filled, pastoral Bohemia.

The production is a co-production with the National Ballet of Canada. It is generously supported by Anna and Moshe Kantor, Lindsay and Sarah Tomlinson, The Royal Opera House Endowment Fund and The Friends of Covent Garden

Christopher Wheeldon’s Position as Artistic Associate is generously supported by Kenneth and Susan Green

It’s clear that both you and Christopher Wheeldon don't shy away from challenges when choosing works to transform into ballets.Yes, we seem to have alighted on the two wordiest writers in the English language when it comes to our selection of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Winter’s Tale! Like a lot of people, I only knew the famous ‘exit pursued by a bear’ direction in the Shakespeare. Chris and I went to see the Royal Shakespeare Company production in New York – I felt it was important that we saw it, and afterwards we went out and had a chat about our thoughts.

Was composing The Winter's Tale more of a challenge than Alice?Yes, definitely. With Alice I unexpectedly found that establishing the magical and mechanical clockwork world would became my baseline, and I could go off in lots of crazy directions – but keep coming back to that as a linking device. There's not really an equivalent in The Winter’s Tale. It’s pretty much a linear narrative that takes you on a journey with a character [Leontes] who descends into irrational jealousy, madness, ruin, remorse and is finally redeemed. There’s no chance to draw breath before heading off on another part of the adventure.

The story of The Winter’s Tale takes us in and out of different places and eras, which would suggest you could use contrasting tone colours and styles for the various scenes.Oh yes, completely. The material in Sicilia (our Act I) and the material in Bohemia (our Act II) are like black and white, or even monochrome and colour; if the first act is King Lear then the second is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s supposed to be as different as possible. These colouristic shifts are meat and drink to ballet. You want to be able to go from high drama to low comedy to romance to reflection to whatever.

So it’s rather like a triple bill crammed into one?Yes, you want as much variety as you can get. We were very clear that Bohemia was going to be a very different place from Sicilia. And it is. The first act is mostly inside this cold, draughty, rather inhuman Sicilian palace, all rather buttoned-up and staid. Bohemia is the exact opposite – it’s out in the open, it’s summertime, it’s full of beautiful fun-loving people having a great old time.

The music for the Sicilian scenes which sandwich the Bohemian one is then presumably much darker.Very much so. The story of The Winter’s Tale is predicated on the idea that everything is ruined by one man’s jealousy. This is actually something that Shakespeare comes back to again and again in his works. And one can see why. Anyone who has suffered from that kind of irrational jealousy knows that it is one of the worst feelings in the world. It goes nowhere, it’s like a big black hole. You can ‘use’ anger, somehow, but you can’t ‘use’ jealousy constructively – it is such a pointless emotion!Having established that this is the driving force behind everything, the challenge was how to depict that in music. I had this image of jealousy appearing as a black feeling in the bottom of your stomach, which then envelops and poisons. So the moment in Act I when Leontes stops fighting his jealousy and gives way to completely irrational thinking, the orchestra is eaten by these great big bass drum and gong notes. I’ve also used strangulated low brass and muted trumpets and shrieking E flat clarinets. I thought about how to depict this jealousy more than anything.

French writer Jules Janin, attending the first night of Giselle in 1841, forgot for a moment that he was sitting in a theatre. ‘The night throws its soft vapours over the entire countryside’, he wrote, ‘around us all is silent… The vapour is Myrtha, the Queen of the Wilis, and the first ray of the September moonlight has imparted to her the fine contours of her beautiful body.’ Around him sat an enraptured audience, delighted to let the dancers, costumers, scenery painters and lighting men transport them from a dusty Paris summer to the spirit-haunted forest of Giselle Act II.

People loved moonlight scenes in theatre, and the rays of the moon, usually painted falling through a window or across a painted ruin, were lit by a flood of green or blue light from the wings and flys. The ‘White Acts’ of Giselle and La Bayadère notwithstanding, blue and green is an integral feature of stage moonlight. John B. Read, relighting the balcony scene in The Royal Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet in 2007, remarked, ‘What colour is moonlight? Is it dark blue? Is it light blue? Is it even blue at all? Maybe it’s green, I don’t know. It could be white.’

Shakespeare, in broad daylight at the Globe or the Rose, never worried about stage moonlight at all and conjured up its beauty with his verse alone. But when his plays were staged in interior theatres nobody could resist lowering the lights (by swivelling the candles round on battens so they appeared to go out) and painting in the moon.

By the mid-18th century the moon was even perceived to shine. This was done by cutting a circular hole in the backdrop, to represent the moon, pasting a transparent gauze over the hole and shining an oil lamp on the gauze. A similar effect is used on the modern stage, with the hole replaced by a disc set behind a cyclorama, and the light shining on it the focussed beam of an electric lamp.

Focussed light, whether from a lump of overheated lime, or an electric carbon arc, was one of the great theatrical innovations of the 19th century. The appearance of a shaft of moonlight bright enough to create a shadow took everyone’s fancy. However, once the beam began to move, people became hyper-aware of the spotlight operator. W. S. Gilbert, for one, couldn’t see a spot without immediately thinking of the man behind it. Watching an improbable tidal wave effect in The Nightingale he noted, ‘The house is swamped and disappears. Mary alone on the wild waste of waters in a boat. Happily the presence of a lime light suggests that human aid is not far off…’.

But what if the moonlight was supposed to be eerie rather than brilliant? Well, a gauze shadow could pass over the moon, or the lighting men could attach a ‘gobo’ (a disc with punched out patterns) on to a lamp, to diffuse the beam.

But in ballet, it seems that you can ditch an actual moon and trust the scenery, costumes, dry ice and sheer technical brilliance of the dancers to induce a proper ghostly effect. The hypnotic opening of Act III of La Bayadère with its perfectly executed arabesques, repeated over and over again by the white-clad Shades, doesn’t need a moonbeam, and nor do the weightless, gliding veiled Wilis in Act II of Giselle.

This is an extract from Sarah Lenton's article 'Well Lit by Moonlight', available to read in full in the Giselle programme book. This is available in the theatre at performance times and from the ROH Shop.

In his article for The Royal Ballet's programme book, Professor René Weis delves into the history of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and discusses its remarkable success as a story that transcends translation.

From very early on Romeo and Juliet was a highly prized work. Proof comes from the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays in the Bodleian in Oxford. For 40 years after its publication in 1623 the volume remained chained to the shelves of the library for use by students and eventually, in 1664, the university traded it in for a Third Folio of the poet’s works. Between 1623 and its sale Oxford’s First Folio was browsed extensively. The edges were worn away, without a trace of tear. It was evidently the favourite play of bright young things.

Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s best-known story but scholars rarely rank it alongside the mature tragedies. They think it is a terrific tale, but not his greatest work. Then again, that may well be a somewhat jaded, middle-aged perspective. The young of course adore the play, presumably because it is first and foremost a teenage love story, a tale of lightning love and bliss turning to tragedy. What renders the play special as literature is its daring and dazzling use of metaphor, nowhere more so perhaps than those rich conceits about Juliet’s eyes trading places with the stars for a break in heaven where, streaming through the firmament, they will illuminate all creation. The play is full of such arresting rhetorical moments, with Shakespeare pulling out all the stops to make us experience – and not just witness – the sheer beauty of this pair of innocent and star-crossed lovers.

It would seem that such a play could only succeed through the medium of its original words from the mid-1590s, but the success of its countless translations and adaptations indicates otherwise. Not much of the elixir of Shakespeare’s poetry survives in Franco Zeffirelli’s cult film or Baz Luhrmann’s dystopian version of the play, more West Side Story than Shakespeare. Nevertheless, these two very different films succeed on their own terms even without the lyrical score of Shakespeare’s language – which will be tested again in Julian Fellowes's new adaptation, released this Friday. These films are carried by plot and types: Leonardo DiCaprio looks like everyone’s preconceived idea of Romeo while Olivia Hussey is Juliet just as Darcey Bussell was in the production of Prokofiev’s ballet (choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan), in my view the greatest, because most magical, adaptation of Shakespeare’s play to date.

When he dramatized the story of Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare pared it down to its bare essentials, to make it fit two hours of playing time. Reshaping his sources he created a contrapuntal structure through a series of artful oppositions between youth and age, light and dark, night and dawn, life and death, that have inspired successive generations every bit as much as the play’s language. The plot of the play is simple and stark and its stylized storyline moves us even without words. It celebrates the power of love and the essential innocence and idealism of children, Shakespeare’s included, which may just be why he lowered Juliet’s age from his source to exactly that of his own daughter Susanna, who was 13 when her father was writing Romeo and Juliet.

The full article by René Weis is in theprogramme book that accompanies Romeo and Juliet. It is available in the theatre at performance times and from the ROH Shop.

The Royal Ballet’s production of Romeo and Juliet runs from 19 October–7 December 2013. Tickets are still available. The production is generously supported by The Paul Ferguson Memorial Fund and staged with generous philanthropic support from Peter Lloyd and the Artists' Circle.